Viral Marketing Lessons

In case you ended up reading this article out of utter confusion about a term in the title, let me begin by answering your query.  What is the point of article spinning?

We sometimes spin articles so that we can get added rewards as a result of the time or financial resources that we have invested into creating an excellent piece of Internet content.  We don’t want the exact same article’s publication on a large number of sites, because content that is too similar won’t benefit anyone involved in the distribution and consumption chain.  Our readers certainly do not want to repeatedly be asked to read the very same article, the websites risk getting no benefit at all from a duplicate article since the major search engines try not to list the same article multiple times in any search results and we, as Internet marketers, in turn have no chance of getting all of the visitors or search engine optimization benefit that we could have have received from entirely fresh content. 

Content or article spinning is really nothing more than rewriting the article multiple times…except that it is a lot easier, although still somewhat time consuming.  What we actually do is rewrite the content one chunk at a time.  The size of the chunk that you rewrite at one time, is up to you as you prepare for spinning.  We essentially provide alternatives for each of those “chunks” from which a software program will randomly select.  We can offer alternatives for complete paragraphs, for complete sentences, for phrases of a few words and for individual words.  We can even code our spinning in such a way so that some versions of the resulting articles may have six paragraphs while other have eight, for example. 

We can also place alternatives within other alternatives, using a process known as nested spinning.  As an example of this, let’s say that my original sentence is, “I adore my new green hat.”  I could rewrite two substitutions for that.  The first might be, “I surely love my green hat that I bought recently.”  A second alternative could be broken into two sentences to achieve even more variety.  “I purchased a new hat not long ago.  It’s a very cheery bright green.”  When these are presented to my spinning software, it will randomly choose one of the three alternatives for each of the many article versions that it provides.

I can provide more alternatives by using nested spinning for each of those options that I have so far created.  I’ll just use the third alternative for a quick example of how this works.  I could provide a rewritten version of the words, “purchased a new hat” to “bought a new cap.”  I could also provide an alternative to “not long ago.”  That might become, “a short while ago.”  In other words options are nested inside other options.

The more alternatives you provide for the computer software, the more versions you will have that are sufficiently different from each other.  Many article marketers believe that the versions should differ from each other by at least 20%, some say 25%, and I usually shoot for a minimum factor of uniqueness of around 30% to 35%.  (I use additional software to measure this factor.

Here are a couple slightly different approaches to make the best use of your article spinning.

Method 1:  Rewrite each paragraph, one at a time, once.  Rewrite the first two or three paragraphs and the last paragraph a second time for each.  Now, using nesting, rewrite each sentence in each of the alternatives one time.  Finally, in the first two or three paragraphs and in the last paragraph, add another level of nesting so that you provide many of your words with alternative synonyms and/or rearrange the wording of a number of the phrases.

Method 2:  Rewrite every sentence in the article at least one time.  Add a third alternative sentence for each sentence in the first two or three paragraphs and the final paragraph.  Apply the first level nesting to selected individual words and phrases in the first three and the final paragraph.  Also provide some alternatives for selected words and phrases in those middle paragraphs.

The first approach is better, especially if you have a high standard of uniqueness that you want to achieve or if you want to generate a large number of unique articles.  While not as thorough, the second method is faster to prepare.

If you outsource your spinning to a professional article spinning company, you should be certain that the service will abide by these general recommendations.  Perhaps you may want to send them a link to this article.